Fetching the Magic Trackpad 2 battery level from the command line and logging it to a file!

When I moved to Germany, I brought a bunch of electronics with me that I had acquired in Japan, Thailand, and the US. Fortunately they all had switching power supplies, so the voltage and frequency difference (110v @ 60 Hz vs 220v @ 50 Hz) wasn’t an issue. The issue was the plugs themselves, so a solution was required.

Recently I’ve been having a lot of 90s nostalgia, especially related to technology. I fully blame YouTube channels like LGR, 8-Bit Guy, Phil’s Computer Lab, Adrian Black, and a dozen others I’ve spent countless hours watching. Plus it’s part of getting older; you romanticise the past.

I started thinking about what hardware from the past I felt the most affinity towards. It took me no time at all: I wanted a Dell Dimension XPS from the 90s. This is my history with Dell.

You’ve got a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter and an Active Directory domain. Here’s how you make them play nicely together.

With the Ubiquiti Edgerouter, you can use policy-based routing to send specific devices’ traffic over a VPN.

When running a brew upgrade, it upgraded readline to version 7.0. This broke the Rails console.

Using openssl with the --subject argument allows you to generate certificates without being prompted for any input. This non-interactive mode makes server automation that much easier.

Say what you will about Microsoft SQL Server Management studio, but the query interface was actually pretty good. Now that I’m using PostgreSQL and MySQL I’m finding myself looking for desktop tools for querying. Nothing more than that, just simple CRUD operations for one-off data imports, querying, figuring stuff out.

It’s been staggeringly difficult to find a desktop client that can do this well. If I were to create one, which I may if my struggle continues, this would be my wishlist. Some of these seem obvious but I’ve found clients lacking one or more of these.

The 2.0 beta version of My Flight Map is currently open for beta testing at kaya.mroach.com. This is a full rewrite using Rails 4.1. With the new platform it will be easier to maintain and add features. The UI is the last bit needing some attention.

Version 2.0 is open source and hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/mroach/myflightmap. All are welcome to submit issues for feature requests and bug reports.

More to come when we’re live.

The new release adds two bits of missing functionality.

Session data

Data from the Session object is now added to reports. Data is described/stringified as best we can, with non-value types being reported with their type name, hash code, and .ToString() value.

Param scrubbing

Sensitive parameter values are now scrubbed. Each character is replaced with an asterisk. By default, any parameter in the following list will be scrubbed:

• password
• password_confirmation
• confirm_password
• secret
• secret_token
• creditcard
• credit_card
• credit_card_number
• card_number
• ccnum
• cc_number

You can override this list by setting the Rollbar.ScrubParams configuration option.